“You are a rarity, my young friend; a life which sidled past the edge of Rowen’s blade. Perhaps she likes you.” A laugh, unpleasant to hear.
Rol opened his eyes. His vision was filled by a face. A bearded man, hair dark and shiny as jet, the beard oiled and waxed into a curled point. His eyes were the color of a skua’s breast, and they changed even as Rol watched. His eyeteeth were made of fang-sharp silver. He smelled of perfume.
The man withdrew. Rol tried to sit up and found that he was naked, bound hand and foot to the posts of a heavy iron bed. A dull pain burned relentlessly below his rib cage. It was stuffy, and the sweat trickling into his eyes blurred his vision. He was in a candlelit stone room, windowless, circular, the ceiling upheld by heavy beams. More, he could not lift his head to see, but he thought he glimpsed a dark shape sitting at the corner of his eye, close to the bed. The girl? As he tried to twist his neck to look, the pain turned his bowels to water and left his dry mouth in a hiss. He closed his eyes until it passed.
“I must go to work,” a low voice said, a woman’s.
“Very well.” It was the bearded man. “But be back after the middle hour-this fellow will need someone to watch over him, and I have appointments to keep.” No answer but the sound of a door closing softly.
“Look at me,” the man’s voice said sharply.
Rol obeyed him. The man filled his vision again. The colors swirled in his eyes, like oil on water.
“You are Ardisan’s kin-I would know that countenance anywhere. Perhaps it made Rowen turn her blade aside. She senses these things too. Hold still.”
Something hot and moist was pressed against his sternum. A tingling spread from it, a warmth that invaded Rol’s head and made him dizzy as if he were inhaling smoke.
“Well, you’ll live, which proves my point. The Blood runs in you-but how true, I wonder?” Here the man raised a vial of scarlet liquid in the candlelight and studied it intently. Seeing Rol’s bleary puzzlement, he smiled, his silver fangs catching the light in turn. “Call it payment, if you will. If it’s as pure as I think, it’ll keep us in bread and oil for many a day.”
“Psellos?” Rol croaked.
The man bowed. “Indeed. Ardisan is dead at last, I take it. Well, he was a worthy fellow in his time, but he was a fool to bury himself out in the middle of nowhere as he did. We conceal ourselves more easily the more cattle we have around us.”
He leaned close over Rol as though recording his features. “Yes-I see your mother in you.” He glanced back at the door. “She was a beauty too.”
“You knew my mother!”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“How? How could-” Rol tried to raise an arm but failed. “Why am I bound?” he demanded.
“One must be cautious. You could be anything-a doppelganger out of Kull knocking on my door.” And he gestured with one long-fingered hand to a shelf near the ceiling. It was lined with jars, and in each floated a face, a severed head in which the eyes glared brightly. One blinked, and its mouth opened in a soundless snarl, making Rol flinch.
“But I can loose you now, I think. Don’t try to sit up-you must allow the poultice to do its work.” He began untying the knots that held Rol to the bed. “They came for him in the end, did they, the local cattle?”
“They burned our home. And Morin and Ayd they killed too.”
Psellos looked up at that. “I would not worry overmuch about golems, useful though they are. Your grandfather had a way with them, it’s true. My talents lie elsewhere.”
The poultice felt as though it were sinking through Rol’s chest, dragging his ribs down to meet his backbone. He grimaced. “Talents? I understand none of this. What did they kill him for-why did they hate us so? How are we different?”
Psellos’s strange eyes went dark. “That’s for another time, I think, when your guts have stopped leaking out of your belly. Rest for now-and do not try to rise or even raise your head. Do not touch the poultice.”
“I’m thirsty.”
“You cannot drink, not yet.”
“Why did she attack me-that girl?”
Psellos threw back his head and laughed. As he did, Rol could have sworn that for a moment a sharp, finger-thin tongue whipped out from between his lips. It was black.
“Ask her, if you dare. But if she had meant you to be dead, you can be sure you would be, blood of Orr or no. Sleep now, my bonny boy, and be thankful I came home when I did.”
He snapped his fingers with a crack, and Rol slept.
Movement on his chest woke him, something warm and heavy slithering there. Frozen by fear, he felt the thing crawl off him, plump onto the bed, and then land with a slap on the floor. His shaking hand felt the place where the girl had stabbed him. It was covered in some manner of slime, and there was a ridged scar, but the wound had closed. He felt clear-headed, incredibly thirsty. The room was dark, save for the guttering stump of a single tallow candle by the bed.
Rol sat up, and immediately a shadow came out of the corner and a cool hand shoved hard against his breastbone, pushing him supine once more. It was the girl, Rowen. He felt his heart thudding under her palm as she held him down. Her hair was hanging dark as a raven’s wing over one eye; the other seemed almost to take on the yellow hue of the candlelight. She was older than he had thought, not a girl but a full-grown woman, his senior by ten years at least. There were shadows under her eyes, fine lines running from the corners of her nose to her mouth. Her lips were dark as a bruise, and on the back of the hand that pinioned him, blue veins stood out stark against the pale skin. Rol was strong for his age, his muscles hardened by work at sea and on land, but he realized that the strength in her slim arm was greater than his own.
All the same, she seemed to him one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
She took her hand away slowly, as if expecting him to spring up again. Her eyes never left his face. She reached at the side of the bed without looking and took hold of a clay cup. This she put to his lips and tilted backwards. Rol drank cool water greedily, some of it trickling down his chin and neck.
“Thank you,” he gasped.
The girl said nothing, but laying aside the cup, she bent over his chest and examined the place where she had wounded him. Her hair brushed Rol’s ribs and stomach, glided across his navel. He felt the cool fingers on his belly for a moment, before she straightened again.
“Get up,” she said, turning away. “Get dressed.”
He had become erect while she had been examining him, but she had given no sign. He turned his back on her, cheeks burning, and pulled on his clothes. They lay over a stool by the bed, and had been washed and their rents mended. A needle and thread sat to one side. Rol wondered if the neat stitching was his companion’s work, but thought it better not to ask.
Now that he could see the room upright, he saw that it was larger than he had supposed, with several doors and alcoves set about the walls. Many shelves and bookcases stood about, all heavy with manuscripts, jars, pots, and leather-bound grimoires as thick as a man’s bicep. A few small round tables sat here and there, and a yard-high brazier red with burning charcoal heated the place well enough to bring the sweat popping out on Rol’s forehead.
On one empty part of the wall, heavy iron rings had been set into the stone, and from these shackles hung.
The girl drew back a chair from one of the tables and gestured for him to sit. There was a full pitcher of water thereon, bread, apples, cold mutton, and pickles. Rol wolfed it down with a will. He could barely remember the last time he had eaten a decent meal. Ayd would have scolded him for his table manners, but Ayd was dead now-and what manner of thing had she been anyway?
He looked at the girl, Rowen, with a new resolve. If there were princesses and queens in the world, he thought, they must look like her. But he had not forgotten the cold violence he had suffered at her hands.
“Who are you?” he asked, emboldened by the good food in his stomach and the close intimacy of the chamber.
“Who are you?” she asked in her turn, raising an eyebrow.
“I…” He hesitated. “I suppose I don’t know, not anymore.”
She shrugged as though that were answer enough, and taking a poniard from the scabbard at her waist began sharpening it deliberately with a small whetstone.
“Why did you attack me?”
She pointed the blade at his face. “You had a knife in your hand and were hammering at Psellos’s door. That is enough, usually. In Ascari the questions come afterward.”
“Were you trying to kill me?”
She paused in her work. “Yes.”
“Psellos doesn’t think so.”
“He may think what he likes.”
“Are you his daughter, or his wife?”
The unsettling eyes stabbed out at him, as cold and hostile as those of a spitting cat.
“No wife. No kin. I work for him.”
“What do you do?”
She actually smiled, but there was no humor in it, a bitterness rather. “Whatever I have to.”
“Psellos, then.” The exasperation was fraying Rol’s voice. “What kind of man is he? A man down on the wharves warned me against him. How did he know my grandfather, my mother?” The last words were a sobbing croak.
Rowen regarded him with mild interest. “I dare say you’ll find out, in time.”
After that Rol gave up on her. He rose from the rags of his meal and set about exploring the chamber. He was not altogether surprised when he found that every door leading out of it was locked. His dirk was gone, and there was nothing he could see in the place that might serve as a weapon. He did not relish the thought of tackling the girl bare-handed. Rubbing his chest, he leafed through the tattered books on the shelves. He could read, after a fashion, but the words within them were in languages he did not know, illustrated with arcane engravings. There was an unclean feel to some of the tomes, which made him wipe his fingers on his breeches after he had laid them back down.
Hours passed. Rowen sat watching him, patient and untiring as a stone. Rol wondered what time it was-surely the winter dawn could not be far off? He was exhausted. Finally he gave his companion a last glare, and fell asleep leaning against the wall. He disliked the idea of the bed with its ropes.
He was on the bed when he awoke, nonetheless. Sunlight streamed into the room through windows that had been hidden behind drapes the night before. The charcoal in the brazier had sunk into ash. Psellos and Rowen were standing by it with their backs to him.
“He’s full-blooded,” Psellos was saying. “I don’t know how it can be, but old Grayven is never wrong. I knew Amerie must have cuckolded the fool, for all her protestations of love.”
“Who was the father, then?” Rowen asked.
“You have me there. But I mean to find out, one way or another. In the meantime, he’ll stay.”
“Another stray to bleed dry?”
“No-he’s much more than that.” Here Psellos ran a hand up into the black mane of Rowen’s hair. Grasping a fistful, he drew her head back sharply and set his mouth on hers. When he released her, there were red teethmarks about her dark lips. He held out his other hand, and without a word she placed something in it. A clink of coin. Psellos smiled into her pale face, rattled the gift in his palm. “A good night. You got the book?”
“Yes. Now I must change. I stink.”
“I like it when you stink,” he said, grinning. She tugged free, leaving black hairs in his fingers. Psellos’s face twisted with mock contrition. “Everything must have a price, Rowen. It is the way of the world.”
“I know. You taught me well.” She left the room without a backward glance.
Psellos stood shaking his head. Smiling still. Then he pocketed his coinage and, turning, kicked the bed. “Up.”
Rol sat up in the bed.
“Come. If you are to stay here, then we must make you useful.”
The Tower was even more spacious than it looked from without. Rol followed his host up a series of corkscrew stairs until they came out on a wide-open space, the balcony he had glimpsed the night before. Morning had come. They were several hundred feet above the level of the sea here, and in the bright winter sunlight all of Ascari could be seen spread below, and beyond it the blue vastness of the Wrywind extending to the horizon. They were looking east, toward Dennifrey, and a life that already seemed part of the vanished past.
“Rol, is it?” Psellos asked casually. “Well, that will do. I am your master now, Rol. You may stay here under my tutelage as Rowen has, but in return I expect perfect obedience.”
“My boat-”
“Sold this morning. It will help to defray your expenses.”
Outraged into silence, Rol took a moment to master his voice. “What if I do not wish to stay?”
“Then you will never have your questions answered.”
He glared at the man. And Psellos laughed.
“You dislike me. Good. That’s well enough for a beginning.”
Thus the education began.
It was enough, for the moment, that he had stopped running. His mind accepted Psellos’s patronage the more easily because he had nothing of familiarity left in the world, not one face he knew. It was easier to convince himself that there was no alternative. And so he submitted.
But he was not admitted to any degree of intimacy. In fact, Rol was at first little better than a scullion, set to all the menial tasks within the Tower that Psellos’s whim dictated. Perhaps this was meant to humble him, but he had been raised to accept hard work without a murmur. So he scrubbed floors and gutted fish and cleared hearths equably enough, and all the while he watched and listened and learned the running of the Tower household.
It was a large establishment, for all that the Tower itself presented an austere frontage to the world. Psellos, Rol quickly discovered, was a man of wealth and influence, and he kept a certain style. To do so, he must needs surround himself with a small army of attendants and underlings.
There was the cook, Gibble-a short, rotund fellow with a bald pate and ferocious eyebrows. He was absolute master in the subterranean chambers that constituted the kitchens, but lived in mortal fear of his employer. He commanded a platoon of spry street urchins who shopped or stole for him according to the dictates of the day’s menu. When the last course of the night was taken up to the Master’s chambers, Gibble would sink back into a wide-bottomed carver and apply himself to the bottle with a dedication that was awesome to behold, while his stunted underlings gorged themselves on the table’s leftovers as recompense for their errand-running.
A manservant there was also, thin as a fish. His name was Quare and he had long white fingers that left moist tracks on everything they touched. His black hair was greased back from his brow. Clad in sable hose, he padded about the stairways of the Tower as noiselessly as a spider. Rol learned early on to avoid meeting him alone, after a groping encounter in the wine cellars. Quare held a privileged position in that he had access to the Master at all times of the day and night. He was Psellos’s ears and eyes in the lower quarters and was cordially hated by everyone.
There were other servants in ever-changing numbers. Valets, grooms, seamstresses. Maids who would arrive winsome and merry, and over time would become haggard, with haunted eyes, before disappearing to be replaced by yet more. And every week associates of Psellos (their own word) would come and go, uniformly obsequious to him and contemptuous of everyone else. A rigid hierarchy existed in Psellos’s Tower, and though to all intents Rol was at the bottom of it (he slept on a pile of rags on the hot flagstones of the scullery) he was nonetheless marked out as different. Quare’s attentions abruptly ceased after the first few days, and he regarded Rol with a mixture of wariness and hatred thereafter.
How Rowen fitted into the household Rol could not quite make out. Everyone deferred to her-out of fear if nothing else-but at the same time gave the impression that they despised her. Only Gibble was different. He treated her almost as a daughter and was always awake, if not entirely sober, when she returned from her nocturnal assignations. He would have food and hot water waiting for her and would see that she wanted for nothing before tottering off to his own bed. As for Rowen, she had a suite of richly appointed rooms in the upper third of the Tower and was often called to join Psellos at table, especially when he was entertaining, but she ate in the kitchen whenever she could and would often take some mundane chore upon herself on a kind of dark whim, working at the long oak table while Gibble clattered pans and chattered to her from the blaring heat of the stoves. She seemed to find the hot semidark of the kitchens soothing, and would sometimes stay there until dawn, sharpening Gibble’s knives and skewers, boning joints with the deftness of a surgeon, or simply staring into the fire. No one but Gibble ever dared to address her.
One night, though, when the entire household was abed, Rol watched her through the scullery door as she stood drinking wine at the kitchen fire. She had just returned from one of her usual forays and was dressed mannishly, in breeches, doublet, and short cloak. Her hair was bound up and she looked almost like some delicate-featured boy. But there was a stiffness about her that marred her usual grace, a care in movement which spoke of some concealed pain.
Rol’s breath stopped in his throat as she began to undress there and then, unaware of his wide eyes watching her. The raven hair was pulled out of its tight coiffure first, falling down onto her shoulders, and then the clothes were discarded with something akin to distaste. Her white skin was washed scarlet by the light of the dying fire, and the taut muscles moved in her thighs and calves, and along the curve of her back, as she examined herself. There was a series of vivid welts and what looked uncannily like bite marks running down her side and flanks, and she bathed them in Gibble’s steaming water, wincing, her face drawn. The vision haunted Rol’s dreams for weeks.
The Tower extended underground for almost as far as it loomed skyward. Days would go by when Rol would not even glimpse sunlight, his work confining him to the kitchens and cellars, the innumerable storerooms and pantries and workshops which were tunneled deep into the hill. He helped unload tall-sided wagons, which came in regularly, loaded with all manner of fruit and vegetable and game and barrel upon barrel of wine, brandy, and beer. These, he learned, were the produce of Psellos’s own estates, vast tracts of arable land and pasture and hunting preserve lying farther inland beyond the Ellidon Hills, farmed by tenants, culled by gamekeepers. A private kingdom over which Michal Psellos was absolute monarch.
In quiet moments Rol would question Gibble and the longer-serving maids about their master and the Tower, but they were not forthcoming. To a man and woman, they were terrified of him, and yet something held them in thrall there, bound them to his service. Rol did discover that Psellos was not of noble blood. And though he speculated in various commodities and had cargoes in many a tall ship up and down the Twelve Seas, he was not a Mercanter. Where then did his immense wealth come from?
Often Rol thought of simply walking away, strolling down to the busy wharves of Ascari and hiring out to some skipper who needed an extra hand. He had recovered some kind of equilibrium now, and he had learned something of the wider world-it would not be difficult. But two things held him back.
Psellos knew his family, the story behind Rol’s own origins perhaps. If Rol left, he might never find that out by himself no matter how much of the world he wandered.
And Rowen. There was something about her that drew him-not just her beauty, but a sadness sensed beneath the chill exterior. If Rol needed to know his own story, he hungered to discover hers.
After the initial few days there was little contact with the Master. Rol saw him often but never spoke to him, nor was he ever addressed. Both Psellos and Rowen seemed to have utterly forgotten his existence, and for the first few months of his new life, Rol did not especially mind. There was much to learn and see, other people to get to know. A routine to master, petty domestic politics to tax the brain with their real and imagined slights, their guessings and whisperings and petty baffling rules.
A couple of brief skirmishes with the other kitchen scullions soon established his physical superiority. Though they were older than him, Rol topped most by half a head and could crack their skulls together even when they came for him three at a time. The smallest and grimiest of them, Ratzo, then offered him a truce.
“There’s one boat here, and we’re all in it,” he said, the sibilants lisping over the gap where his front teeth should have been. “It may be we could carve your guts for you in your sleep, but rumor has it the Master has took a special interest in you, so we’ll forbear. You’re on probation, mind, Fisheye.” They had spat on each other’s palms and shaken hands, and after that Rol was more or less accepted as one of them. The nickname stuck, and much though he hated it, Rol finally accepted the label. He had that in common with Psellos and Rowen, he realized: something in his eyes that made other folk uneasy. A strangeness.
Like all the other scullions, Rol tried to befriend Gibble, but unlike them he had some success, both because he was genuinely uninterested in cadging more kitchen scraps (life in Eyrie had always been frugal), and because he was unfazed by hard work, did not complain, and carried out his chores promptly, taking a perverse pride in performing the meanest of them to perfection.
One night, some two and a half months after he had joined the household, he sat up with Gibble as the stout cook cracked open his nightly bottle of aguarputa -the cheap but potent spirit of Ascari’s slums-and listened patiently to his well-worn and oft-heard complaints about the poor quality of his underlings, the rapacity of the merchants in the upper city, the declining quality of imported nutmeg. Rol was only half listening. It was a spring night outside, under the open sky. Even here in the dungeonlike confines of the kitchens it was possible to sense the turning of the year. Rol was thinking of Gannet, wondering if she floated yet, and if her new owner had repainted her sea-eyes and anointed her bows as Grandfather had once done every year with the first primroses. And he was absentmindedly poking at the red hell of the fire in the immense black iron range which extended clear across one wall of the kitchen, keeping the coals bright to heat Rowen’s water. As the hours passed Gibble grew drunker, and his rambling talk turned to subjects other than the matters of the kitchen. He described with great relish just what he had been doing to Mina, the oldest of the serving-maids, the night before in return for the princely bribe of one roast game hen. Generally a good-natured man, Gibble nonetheless felt the need every now and again to fathom the limits of his authority. The reluctant (but hungry) girl had succumbed, and that was that-his faith in his own place in the world was vindicated, and he would molest nothing more animate than a bottle for weeks to come. In truth, the maids did not much mind Gibble’s advances, at least compared to Quare’s. The bodyservant’s attentions would leave them bruised and weeping for days, unable to speak of what had been done to them, unable to forget it either. Gibble at least tried not to hurt them.
Rol they had all swooned over from the beginning, and he had had his pick of the litter. He had lost his virginity in the first week, pumping the insistent girl hard up against a dark wall in the cellars, surprised by how little it meant to him. From time to time he had been importuned again, and had obliged. But every time he thrust into some squealing girl he was seeing Rowen in the kitchen that night, before the fire, and was imagining her dark lips pressed hungrily against his own.
Gibble moved on from his lecherous reminiscing. As he became drunker he grew more morose. He checked the dripping water-clock and seemed troubled. Rol dozed for a while-it was several hours past the middle of the night and his day had started before dawn. When he nodded out of sleep he found Gibble still talking, half to himself.
“It’s not right what he makes her do-it’s not as if the Master needs the money. No, he does it to shame her, to keep her in her place. And those creatures he makes her-” He stopped, stared down at a yawning Rol. “And you too. It’s plain as a pikestaff all over your face, but he thinks he’s the only one who notices. He’s getting careless, is what.” Gibble swallowed hard from the neck of his denuded bottle and wiped his mouth with one meaty forearm.
“What’s plain on my face?” Rol asked softly.
“I’ve been here longer than anyone-eighteen years. I’ve seen it all. Two more and my time is done-he told me so. Two more and I’m free again. Not that it wasn’t worth it, to see those whoresons choke on their own offal.” Here Gibble grew maudlin, and began to weep. “So beautiful, she was. That was why. It’s said they can’t suffer after death. Gods above us, I hope it’s true. True for her. But the Master put it to rights. He always keeps his word. He promised they would die slow, and they did. Twenty years. Half a life. She was nineteen when she died.” Gibble began to sob quietly.
The door to the kitchens slammed back against the wall. Gibble and Rol both jumped. The bottle slipped through the cook’s thick fingers to smash on the slick flags of the floor.
It was the Master himself, with Quare at his side. Psellos looked about the room, his gaze lingering on Rol with a frown, as though the boy’s presence reminded him of something he would have sooner forgotten.
“Where is Rowen?” Psellos demanded. “Not back yet?”
Gibble was trying to stand up and failing. Psellos never came down here. “No, my lord. No sign of her-and she’s hours late. I have her water ready here. I sat up waiting-”
“I can see that. Quare, go fetch Skewer, and a lantern. Be quick.”
The bodyservant took off in silent haste.
Psellos stood looking into the flame-light of the range’s open door. Taking a pair of gloves from his belt he drew them on thoughtfully, tugging the calfskin snugly over each knuckle. There was a dangerous light in his shifting eyes. Rol sat silent and still with the reek of spilled aguarputa all about him, watching.
“My beautiful young apprentice has grease in his hair. How does he find life in Psellos’s Tower?” The Master did not look away from the fire as he spoke.
“No worse and no better than in other places,” Rol said, and he received a thump on the shoulder from Gibble.
Psellos smiled, and turned to regard him. “I have had men flayed for turning the word on me, boy.”
“Why ask a question if you do not want to hear an honest answer?”
“Men rarely ask questions out of genuine curiosity. They want what they already know to be confirmed. Or they want the answer to the question they have not asked. It is good that you have spirit, boy, but be careful to whom you reveal it. Not all men of my station are as indulgent with their inferiors.”
Rol was about to retort, but Psellos’s eyes stopped him. The dark man smiled again, silver glimmering in the corners of his mouth. “That’s better.”
Quare returned, high forehead shining. “My lord.”
Psellos took from him a long, slim sword with a guarded hilt. The scabbard was worked with silver and obsidian. He buckled it to his belt unhurriedly.
“Come with me,” he said to Rol.
Psellos, Quare, and Rol took to the winding stairs that led up to ground level. They came out in the wide circular atrium which took up almost an entire floor of the Tower. Here Quare lit the lantern from a candle-sconce in the wall. Psellos spoke to Rol. His voice was cold and grim.
“You will stay here by the door and watch for our return. If any others seek to enter you must bar the door in their faces. Open for no one except me-not even Quare here. Do you understand?” Rol nodded dumbly, wondering what had happened.
The Master and his bodyservant slipped out of the postern Rowen had once opened to Rol, and quickly made their way down the winding street toward the lower city, the lantern throwing bars and wands of light about their feet.
Just before they disappeared, Rol stepped out of the postern himself. Motivated by he knew not what, he pulled the door to behind him, but did not let the big latched lock snick shut. Then he set off at a run in the wake of Psellos and Quare.
Five